GODZILLA MEETS THE NEIGHBORS! Huge Monsters vs. Crass Frat Boys!!

Fraternity Raises Monsters in Basement

I saw two movies last week, GODZILLA and NEIGHBORS!  Both films were based on ludicrous premises.  Godzilla is a wonderful but ludicrous monster, and the suggestion that any suburban neighborhood would have zoning that would allow an out-of- control fraternity to buy a house as happens in NEIGHBORS is almost as ludicrous.  I tepidly enjoyed them both, but I was a little disappointed.

     I was psyched for GODZIRRA based on the trailers, but I found it to be a little slow.  Great special effects, of course.  The Big G eventually saves not only San Francisco but the world as we know it.  But. . . The only performance I found to be believable, (except, of course, the ones by the monsters) was the wife/nurse played by Elizabeth Olsen, who it turns out is the little sister of Mary Kate and Ashley.  Elizabeth can really act, but her face is so sweetly round that it occasionally looked like a balloon in 3-D.  (This was my first experience with current 3-D films.)

     As to NEIGHBORS, someone should do a time study to see whether there were more minutes of crass foolishness or more of humanly acceptable verbal exchange in the movie.  I definitely think crass foolishness would win.  Some good laughs, but this frat house film pales in comparison to the father of all crass fraternity pictures, ANIMAL HOUSE.  Best performance? Hands down the two babies who played baby Stella.  Sweet, hilarious, lovable.  This infant was so good and so sweet, I thought at times she might have been CG!  (That means computer generated.  I hate it when people write something in a blog or article as if it were common knowledge, when it might not be common knowledge   It's like the writers who put philosophical quotes in French in articles in THE ATLANTIC and THE NEW YORKER.)  But I digress. . .

     On my own scale of effectiveness I give these films both ISWUOD, "I shoulda waited until On Demand."  If I had to chose a favorite, I think I would be more apt to watch NEIGHBORS a second time than GODZIRRA.  Although, Elizabeth Olsen does have a very cute and very round face.  If you enjoy watching faces that are both cute and round, you might opt for a second viewing of GODZILLA in its current incarnation.

Patty LuPone and Mandy Patinkin in the 'Cuse!

We went to the Civic Center on Tuesday night to see two Broadway legends perform.  Both Mandy Patinkin and Patti LuPone won Tony's for Andrew Lloyd Webber's EVITA way back in 1980, and their performances in that musical could be said to have birthed their long and successful careers.  I remember watching the TONY Awards back in 1980 and seeing Patti LuPone as Evita and Mandy Patinkin as Che Guevera.  When I watched them 34 years ago, I remember thinking how absolutely wonderful these two powerful young talents were.  Patti was 30 at the time, and Mandy was 27.  I knew they were both going to be around and amazing for a long time.

I have to admit to a little trepidation when we arrived at the theater on Tuesday.  These two shining stars were, after all, my true contemporaries; we are in our 60's together.  Would their voices suffer from the inevitability of growing older?  Well, I wish I could say that they sang as beautifully as they did in 1980, but I can't.  Their voices have aged.  They creak a bit like my knees.  Mandy Patinkin, for me, was always at his best in the higher register.  His voice soared and was almost impossibly pure.  Patti LuPone's soprano was pure and monstrously powerful and awesome to hear.  Now Mandy's high notes are not quite what they were, and he growls in the lower register.  Patti is not the wall- shaking crystal-smasher she used to be.  But it's all right.  They still are a joy to watch and listen to, even if it's a bit like watching shadows and listening to echoes.

Here begin a few specific thoughts about the our evening with Mandy and Patti.  I loved the SOUTH PACIFIC duet at the beginning of the show, but I'm not sure why it was sung so rapidly.  Was it a comment on the fact that Emile DeBecque said that he needed to grab onto things quickly lest they get away?  I don't know, but I know theatergoers were troubled by it.  The same can be said about the rapid Sondheim lyrics.  They were very hard to understand for me, and I know most of the words.

I was really impressed with Mandy Patinkin's staging of this two person piece.  He gave me a lot of ideas for directing people of later middle age.  The most important point being be sure there are chairs, because they'll want to sit down a lot.  The show included a dance performed on rolling desk chairs.  Choreographed by Anne Reinking, it was a highlight of the evening.

I really loved the anecdotes of life in the theater, especially the one about the early performance of EVITA in California.  I wish there had been more.

Why was the show lit so. . .darkly?  I mean, it was occasionally hard to make out the players from up in the mezzanine.  All those beautiful lights in the Civic Center!  Use them. . .or does too much light reveal too much. . .?

When the inevitable standing ovation came at show's end, it was, I think for most of the people watching, myself included, part standing "O" for lifetimes of achievement and part for the abilities that Mandy Patinkin and Patti LuPone still have to continue to perform at a high level after doing it for a good long time.

Some people may wonder why such established stars, certainly with plenty of things to do, still go on the road to perform for live audiences.  After all, Patti LuPone wrote a best-selling memoir and Mandy Patinkin has his Showtime gig as Saul on HOMELAND.  Of course, on HOMELAND he could get assassinated at any moment just as an interesting plot twist.  I can only guess at the why of there need to stand behind the footlights still.  I think it's because that's what they do.  That's what they love to do.   The classic "Don't Cry For Me Argentina," begins with Eva/Patti singing, "It won't be easy/You'll think it's strange/When I try to explain how I feel/That I still need your love after all that I've done. . ." It may be something like that, too.  The love from the audience is a necessity, like food and water and music.




I found the TONY performance that I mentioned earlier in this post.  You might enjoy it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QtZxxbStjs

Obesity in Literature

This essay is not about the Beadle in OLIVER TWIST or Piggy in LORD OF THE FLIES or Ignatius J. Reilly in A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES.  This is not a treatise on fat characters but rather a treatise on obese books.  Like the American public, American popular literature is going to fat.  The bestseller lists are filled with novels that have man boobs and love handles and several chins.

Cases in point:  the novels of Stephen King.  I believe many of King's novels are really obese.  Stephen King remains one of my favorite writers.  I think his book ON WRITING is both a terrific memoir and great how-to text.  And it's short!  That's why I can't understand why he feels the need to write books that are so frickin' chunky.  Looking at my bookshelf, where I have several King novels, I see some fat tubs of prose.  DUMA KEY needs "verbo-suction" at nearly 800 pages.  And both IT and THE "Complete and Uncut" STAND both go well over 1100 pounds. . .I mean pages.  These are fat books!

I'm sure people will say that they love King's lack of brevity.  They feel that his lengthy narration with his intricate descriptions of place, his many insertions of elements of our pop culture, and his monstrous number of characters are what make him special.  I won't argue with your taste.  It just isn't for me.  I have had a hard time finishing the last few King reads I began, including UNDER THE DOME, the source of the TV mini-series and over 1300 pages on my Nook.  I couldn't finish BAG OF BONES.  It is the first King novel that I started that I just couldn't stand to finish because it was too damn fat.  Give me the days of SALEM'S LOT and THE SHINING once again.

Now to my next prosy overeater.  I just finished my third or fourth Jack Reacher novel, PERSUADER.   I discovered the Lee Child series of books shortly before Tom Cruise starred in the eponymous Jack Reacher movie.  Reacher is a vagabond, a traveling man, who graduated from West Point and had a 12 or 13 year career as an officer in the MP's.  His exploits there trained him well for what he does which is travel identity-less around the country doing good on his own terms, while doing in lots of bad guys.  The Reacher novels are good books.  Fun to read.  But obese.  PERSUADER is 480 pages long and would be great at 280.  The hero Jack Reacher is lean and tough.  This novel has a big roll hanging over its belt.  There is one scene where Jack Reacher sneaks out the upstairs window of a seaside mansion and makes his way across the yard on a rainy, windy night.  The reader is forced to step on every frickin' brick as Jack descends the wall.  You get soaked from the description of the rain.  Is this effective writing?  Of course, and I would love it in a suspenseful short story.  Not a fat novel.  The pages of description slow the book down and. . .horror of horrors. . .make me want to skip ahead to see just where this story is going.

Reading PERSUADER brought me to this topic along with reading Walter Mosley's newest Easy Rollins book LITTLE GREEN, a tough, sinewy, and svelte novel.  If you've never read Walter Mosley, ya gotta!  In his Easy Rollins books, Rollins chronicles post-World War II African-American culture in Southern California with amazing sensitivity, objectivity, and awareness.  "Easy" is a character like Jack Reacher in that he does good things, most of the time, for people, and some bad people get done in along they way.  But Easy is also is a philosopher, a social critic, and the soul of his people and his time.  The prose of Mosley's novel is rich and beautiful and TIGHT!  In spinning a tale of Los Angeles of the late sixties on Sunset Strip and in the enclaves of hippies, Mosley's LITTLE GREEN sends Rollins on a fascinating quest for redemption and for the right to be alive.  And he does it in 280 beautiful pages.  Some other books that are wonderful in both their eloquence and brevity are OF MICE AND MEN of by John Steinbeck, the Lew Archer novels of Ross McDonald, the novels of Richard Brautigan, and the aforementioned  LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding.  Of course, there are hundreds more

Certainly, there are wonderful novels that need to be 900 or 1000 pages long.  Books like the complete LES MISERABLES and the LORD OF THE RING trilogy come to my mind, and also WAR AND PEACE, the greatness of which  I can't attest to because I never read it.  (In fact, I'm not sure that I know many people who have.)   But there are reasons why we find these books on the classics shelf at the book store.  The classic status gives those book the right to be measured both in pages and pounds.

Why are there so many obese volumes?  I don't for sure, but I would guess the public demands them. A bunch of enablers, popular fiction readers demand their beach-reads and guilty pleasures be fattened up so they get the most of their favorite writer for their money.  In response to the public demand, I imagine that editors of successful pop authors push their clients to be long rather than short-winded.  I wish that instead they would give each author a 300 page per book limit, except on their 50th birthdays when they get to have 400.  I can't see this prose diet being adopted, I'm afraid.


Last year I railed quietly against Stephen King's largeness in this blog:
http://wwwmotleyplayer.blogspot.com/2013/06/another-day-another-gigundo-stephen.html